The first mention of Germanic tribes was made by Pitheas, a Greek historian and geographer of the 4th c. B.C. Julius Caesar described some militant Germanic tribes the Suevians who bordered on the Celts of Gaul in the North-East. A few decades later the Roman historian Tacitus compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons.
Towards the beginning of our era the common period of Germanic history came to an end. The Teutons had extended over a larger territory and the PG language broke into parts. PG split into three branches: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. In due course these branches split into separate Germanic languages.
East Germanic
The tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era formed the East Germanic subgroup. The most numerous and powerful of them were the Goths. They moved south-east and reached the lower basin of the Danube, where they made attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. Their western branch invaded Roman territory, participated in the assaults on Rome and moved on to southern Gaul, to found one of the first Barbarian kingdoms of Medieval Europe, the Toulouse kingdom. The Kingdom lasted until the 8th c. though linguistically the native population, the Romanised Celts, soon absorbed the western Goths.
The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records of the 4th6th c. It is one of the languages of the Germanic group; it represents a form of language very close to PG and therefore throws light on the pre-written stages of history of all the languages of the Germanic group, including English.
North Germanic
The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages. The North Germanic tribes lived on the southern coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula and in Northern Denmark since the 4th c. They did not participate in the migrations and were relatively isolated, though they may have come into closer contacts with the western tribes after the Goths left the coast of the Baltic Sea. The speech of the North Germanic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and is regarded as a sort of common North Germanic parent language called Old Norse or Old Scandinavian. It has come down to us in runic inscriptions dated from the 3rd to the 9th c. The disintegration of Old Norse into separate dialects and languages began after the 9th c., when the Scandinavians started their sea voyages. The famous Viking Age, from about 800 to 1050 A.D., is the legendary age of Scandinavian raids and expansion overseas. The principal linguistic differentiation in Scandinavia corresponded to the political division into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The three kingdoms constantly fought for dominance and the relative position of the three languages altered, as one or another of the powers prevailed over its neighbours.
The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Swedish date from the 13th c. In the later Middle Ages, with the growth of capitalist relations and the unification of the countries, Danish, and then Swedish developed into national literary languages. Nowadays Swedish is spoken not only by the population of Sweden; the language has extended over Finnish territory and is the second state language in Finland.
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Norwegian was the last to develop into an independent national language. During the period of Danish dominance Norwegian intermixed with Danish. As a result in the 19th c. there emerged two varieties of the Norwegian tongue: the state or bookish tongue (later called bokmal), which is a blending of literary Danish with Norwegian town dialects, and a rural variety, landsmal. Landsmal was sponsored by 19th c. writers and philologists as the real, pure Norwegian language. At the present time the two varieties tend to fuse into a single form of language ("New Norwegian").
The North Germanic subgroup includes two more languages: Icelandic and Faroese, whose origin goes back to the Viking Age.
Beginning with the 6th c. the Scandinavian sea-rovers and merchants undertook distant sea voyages and set up their colonies in many territories. The Scandinavian invaders, known as Northmen, overran Northern France and settled in Normandy (named after them). Crossing the Baltic Sea they came to Russia the "varyagi" of the Russian chronicles. Crossing the North Sea they made disastrous attacks on English coastal towns and eventually occupied a large part of England the Danes of the English chronicles. They founded numerous settlements in the islands around the North Sea, Ireland and the Faroe Islands; going still farther west they reached Iceland, Greenland and North America.
Linguistically, in most areas of their expansion, the Scandinavian settlers were assimilated by the native population: in France they adopted the French language; in Northern England, in Ireland and other islands around the British Isles sooner or later the Scandinavian dialects were displaced by English. In the Faroe Islands the West Norwegian dialects brought by the Scandinavians developed into a separate language called Faroese. Faroese is spoken nowadays by about 30,000 people.
Iceland was practically uninhabited at the time of the first Scandinavian settlements (9th c.). Icelandic developed as a separate language in spite of the political dependence of Iceland upon Denmark and the dominance of Danish in official spheres. As compared with other North Germanic languages Icelandic has retained a more archaic vocabulary and grammatical system. Modern Icelandic is very much like Old Icelandic and Old Norse, for it has not participated in the linguistic changes, which took place in the other Scandinavian languages, probably because of its geographical isolation. At present Icelandic is spoken by over 200 000 people.
West Germanic
Around the beginning of our era the would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe bordering on the Slavonian tribes in the East and the Celtic tribes in the South. They must have retreated further west under the pressure of the Goths, who had come from Scandinavia, but after their departure expanded in the eastern and southern directions. The dialectal differentiation of West Germanic was probably quite distinct even at the beginning of our era. On the eve of their "great migrations" of the 4th and 5th c. the West Germans included several tribes: the Franconians (or Franks), who occupied the lower basin of the Rhine; the Angles and the Frisians (known as the Anglo-Frisian group), the Jutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of the modern Netherlands, the former Federal Republic of Germany and the southern part of Denmark. A group of tribes known as High Germans lived in the mountainous southern regions of the Federal Republic of Germany. High Germans as contrasted to Low Germans a name applied to the West Germanic tribes in the low-lying northern areas. The High Germans included a number of tribes whose names are known since the early Middle Ages: the Alemanians, the Swabians, the Bavarians, and others.
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The Franconian dialects were spoken in the extreme North of the empire; in the later Middle Ages they developed into Dutch - the language of the Low Countries (the Netherlands) and Flemish - the language of Flanders.
The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and its variant in Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treated as a single language, Netherlandish. Netherlandish is spoken by almost 20 million people; its northern variety, used in the Netherlands, has a more standardised literary form.
About three hundred years ago colonists brought the Dutch language to South Africa from Southern Holland. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West Germanic language, Afrikaans. Afrikaans has incorporated elements from the speech of English and German colonists in Africa and from the tongues of the natives. Writing in Afrikaans began as late as the end of the 19th c. Today Afrikaans is the mother tongue of over four million Afrikaners and coloured people and one of the state languages in the South African Republic (alongside English).
The High German group of tribes did not go far in their migrations. Together with the Saxons the Alemanians, Bavarians, and Thuringians expanded east, driving the Slavonic tribes from places of their early settlement.
The High German dialects consolidated into a common language known as Old High German (OHG). The first written records in OHG date from the 8th and 9th c. (glosses to Latin texts, translations from Latin and religious poems). Towards the 12th c. High German eventually developed into the literary German language. The Written Standard of New High German was established after the Reformation (16th c.), though no Spoken Standard existed until the 19th c., as Germany remained politically divided into a number of kingdoms and dukedoms. To this day German is remarkable for great dialectal diversity of speech.
The High German language in a somewhat modified form is the national language of Austria, the language of Liechtenstein and one of the languages in Luxemburg and Switzerland. It is also spoken in Alsace and Lorraine in France. The total number of German-speaking people approaches 100 million.
Yiddish grew from the High German dialects, which were adopted by numerous Jewish communities scattered over Germany in the 11-th c. and 12-th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew and Slavonic and developed into a separate West Germanic language with a spoken and literary form. Yiddish was exported from Germany to many other countries: Russia, Poland, the Baltic states and America.
Glossary
Diachrony a specific approach towards of a language when phenomena are studied through time, the development of a language is the object of such investigation.
Dynamics the changes of the system.
Evolution - gradual development.
External (extra-linguistic) factors the changes of a language, which are connected with the life of human society.
Internal (intra-linguistic) factors the development of a language due to the linguistic laws.
Language units the single language wholes, e.g. phonemes, words, affixes, syntactic constructions.
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Linguistic change the process of transformation, replacement and conversion of language units.
Linguistic levels language subsystem forming the hierarchical structure of the language, e.g. phonemic level, morphemic, lexical, syntactical, super-syntactical and the level of the text.
Merging the process when two or more units fall together and are replaced by one unit.
Replacement the process when one unit is used instead of the other.
Revolution a far-reaching and drastic change.
Splitting the process when two distinct units take the place of one.
Synchronic variations - the co-existence of two or more forms of a language unit at the same time.
Synchrony a specific approach towards a language when phenomena are studied at a particular period without considering historical changes.
Literature
A) Principal:
1. / -, . , 2002. C. 3-9.
2. Rastorgueva T.A. A History of English. M., 1983. Chapter 1 (P.14 - 24), Chapter 2 (P.24-33).
B) Supplementary:
1. .. . ., 1985. C. 9-15.
2. .., .., .. . ., 1999. . 41-45.
3. Tokareva E. Pages of History. Great Britain, the USA. M., 1985.
